Thursday, July 6, 2017

Staunton, July 6 – Russian laws
governing the rights of immigrants “promotes not their integration but rather
their segregation,” a problem that is going to become ever more acute as Moscow
uses immigrants to compensate for declining numbers in its domestic population
and labor force, according to Anna Prokhorova.

In a new book (An Assessment of the Effectiveness of Immigrant Integration Policies in
Russia (in Russian), Moscow, 2017, 109 pp., a complete text of which is
available at fergananews.com/archive/2017/Book_Prokhorova.pdf),
the demographer who has been working on migration issues for the World Bank
lays out the reasons for that conclusion.

Employing the MIPEX integration
index that was developed for EU countries, Prokhorova says that immigrants to
Russia have vastly fewer rights than Russian citizens and only half as great an
opportunity to rise in the labor market as do Russian citizens, the result she
says of Russia’s lack of a strategy for integrating immigrants.

What that means, she continues, is that Russia
“doesn’t recognize the possibility of transforming such migrants into its own
constant residents or citizens.” Instead, it drives them into ghettos, forces
them to live in semi-legal conditions, and ultimately drives them out of Russia
back to their homelands.

She gives as an example of just how
out of step Russia is with European norms. Most immigrants in Europe now are
allowed to enter because they have relatives in this or that country. Those
relatives need not be citizens, but their application can be the basis for
admission. In Russia, such arrangements are lacking: Only citizens can invite
relatives to enter.